“If it’s any consolation,” Matt said, “you look wonderful. ”
“Professor!” She stared at the ground but did smile. There was an uncomfortable silence. She looked at the cheese plate doubtfully and broke off a small piece. She nibbled at it, made a face, and put it back. “I’m afraid it’s gone bad,” she said.
Arl stared at the piece she’d put back. “That’s a rare Italian gorgonzola!”
“Well, it tastes as bad as it sounds.”
“Gorgonzola!” Matthew snatched it up, rolling his eyes, and got a wedge of apple in the other hand, and took a bite of each. Martha stared.
“If you can’t lock the time machine,” Arl said, “can someone just step in and take it into the future?”
“Not possible, no. Only I can turn it on.” Well, it was true that only he hadturned it on.
“Then we could simply move the money, and whatever else that might have value, into my storeroom for the time being. If you decide to move on, I could deduct a reasonable amount for storage. Assuming that the coins do turn out to have some value.” He leaned back and looked at the floating sum, which changed from BC 35,700 to BC 35,937. “You wouldn’t have another bottle of wine in that bag? Or some other ancient collectible?”
“No, it’s stuff I need for time travel—to make the time machine work.” Like a gun and a porn notebook. “Maybe the bread and cheese would be interesting to scientists. Presumably it would be chemically different from what you make now.”
“I don’t think we have that kind of scientist. But I could try, while it’s still fresh.”
“ ‘That kind’?” Matt asked. “What kind do you have?”
“Well, I’m a food scientist myself. I know thousands of recipes. And Em has a doctorate in shopping science.”
“Arl is just as good at it,” she said modestly, “even without a degree.”
“What about physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy?”
“Oh, it’s all there. You can look it up,” Arl said. “But it’s for machines, of course, the research. People don’t think fast enough. Can’t remember enough.”
Matt was speechless. He looked at Martha for support. She was frowning at Em and Arl in confusion. “How can machines think?”
“They’ve been doing it for thousands of years,” Em said.
“More than two centuries before you were born, machine intelligence transformed the world.” Arl said. “When religious fanatics took over your part of the world, they got rid of most thinking machines. They kept the ones they needed, evidently, like the killer satellites that keep us out of their airspace.”
“It’s not Avenging Angels, dear.” Em offered her some cheese and apple slices. “Just machines, like the one that brought you here.”
She stared blankly at the food. “Is there somewhere I could talk to the professor alone? Back in the bank vault . . . time machine?”
“Sure,” Arl said. “Auction won’t close for almost a half hour.”
When they were outside, she took his hand and rushed him silently to the vault. Inside, she sat down on the stack of dollar coin sacks and stared at him.
“I feel like I’m going crazy. Like I’m in a crazy dream, a nightmare, and can’t wake up. You have to explain what’s going on.”
“Okay. My time machine took us 2094 years into the future—”
“Before that. You were running away from Jesus.”
“Yes and no. I needed money for travel . . .”
“Well, you got that.”
“But I didn’t mean to rob a bank.” Steal a bank, actually. “I was just going to cash in some old money for a thousand or so, and take it back, with the time machine, to where Jesus appears. Then use the machine to take me and all the machines in that room up into the future.
“I didn’t mean to kidnap you. I’m sorry. It’s an awful reward for saving a person’s life.”
She shook her head. “You and I think differently about rewards. I think God rewards us for good works and punishes us for bad. He puts us in positions where we have to make choices.”
Matt could only shrug.
“You were going to use your machine to take Jesus away. The illusion of Jesus, you said.”
“That, yes, but also to get out of Cambridge while I still had the option of escaping.”
She chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “So maybe God, or maybe chance, put me between you and that policeman. Why was he shooting at you?”
“Um . . . that’s a little embarrassing.” She just stared at him. “I went into the toilet to take a pee. The policeman was there, and he saw I wasn’t circumcised. Do you know what that is?”
She closed her eyes and shuddered. “They cut a part away from your thingie.”
“Well, the church I was born into required that. But my mother and father decided against letting them do it.”
“Really?” She smiled. “Me, too. My mother wouldn’t let them circumcise me, when I was a girl.”
“They circumcise women?”
“Unless the mother objects. Mother had to pay a fine and do penance for a year.”
“Why do they do it?”
“Well, why do they do it to you?”
“It’s just a custom left over from the old days, and it made some sense when men didn’t bathe regularly. But it doesn’t have the same effect as on women, on girls.”
“What is that supposed to be?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Nothing specific, not yet. That’s a big part of my next passage, when I turn twenty-one. Next month.”
“In some cultures, mostly before I was born, they did it to deny sexual pleasure to women.”
She shook her head in two small jerks. “I wouldn’t know anything about that, not yet. I’m not allowed.”
“You will be, after you’re twenty-one?”
“I don’t know. If they told you the secrets before your Passage, they wouldn’t be secrets.” Her blush indicated that she did know something. “So how did you make everything disappear? How did you turn this bank vault into a time machine?”
He lifted the machine out of the bag. “This is the actual time machine.” He tapped on the plastic dome. “If I push this button, it goes forward in time. And takes everything nearby along with it.” He held up the alligator clip. “If this little thing is in contact with a metal container, like this vault, then everything inside the container goes.”
“But just one way. You can’t go back.”
“I don’t know how, yet. But I’m sure it can be done. Not in my time and certainly not in yours. Another reason I had to move forward. But I’m sorry I dragged you along.”
“Don’t be. There’s a reason for everything.”
There was a whisper like a giant exhaling, and a vehicle drifted to a landing between them and the house. It was a sleek functional airfoil, as reflective as mercury, shimmering except for the solid blue block letters LA.
Matt checked his watch. “Auction should be closing now.”
She was hypnotized. “That’s what you fly in?”
“Nowadays, I guess so. If you can afford it.” As they walked by the thing, she gaped at her fun-house-mirror reflection. “It makes you look pregnant.”
She smiled. “That would have been right after the Passage. At least you saved me from that.”
Maybe so, he was thinking, and maybe not. I ought to keep an eye out for Safeluv patches, or whatever they use up here.
They looked at the thing for a minute, and nothing happened. “I guess it’ll tell us when it’s ready.”
The door to the house opened. Arl looked at the ship and didn’t react. “Congratulations. The museum got it for 62,037. Come in and look at your choices.”
“Choices?” They followed him back to the dining room. In the air over the platform there was a glowing list of about a hundred things and services with their BC value. An ancient Egyptian ring for BC 50,000—that would be practical.
“What, we can’t just take the B chits?”